What is a "bus error"?

[Erno Kuusela]

In article
<Pine.LNX.4.43.0202011202560.4970-100000 at zeon.well.ox.ac.uk>, Kenny
<kccw at well.ox.ac.uk> writes:

| 	I recently installed Python 2.2-5 from Fink (Unix Software for
| MacOSX) and tried running a few sample scripts/programs.
| 	However, some of these programs now give a "bus error" message -
| what does this mean?

it means python got a SIGBUS signal from the kernel, ie it crashed.
SIGBUS commonly results from attempting to access unaligned memory.

so it seems that there is a bug in the fink packaging of python, or
python itself. you could try asking the fink people and/or compiling
python yourself and seeing if that works. (if it doesn't, file a
bug in the python bug tracker.)

  -- erno